Call it the end of an era. Last week, AKB48's 49th single "#Sukinanda" sold over 1 million copies to take the top spot on the Oricon singles chart. Besides being the first song in the No. 1 position to feature a hashtag in its ...
Music is often characterized over-simplistically as a battle between rock and pop, seriousness and fun, but the two are always in an ever-shifting balance. With this column coming to the end of its six-year run, it feels timely to cast a look back — ...
Japan's all-girl idol group AKB 48 is launching yet another sister group, this time to be based in the Seto Inland Sea area. STU48 stands for Setouchi, the Japanese name of the coastal areas surrounding the waterway in western Japan. It will have its theater ...
The man behind AKB48 expresses regret after a different act performed in outfits resembling Nazi-era military uniforms.
The idol group Keyakizaka46, a branch of Japan's top-selling girl band AKB48, has sparked outrage on social media over their Halloween costume, which resembled the uniform worn by Nazi SS officers before and during World War II. During a show Oct. 22 at Yokohama Arena ...
About 30,000 people packed a baseball stadium in Niigata for the annual event to announce the most popular members of the AKB48 family of all-female idol groups.
Talk about too cool for school. Some high schools are adopting uniforms that draw on contemporary cultural influences such as manga. It is a continuation of a trend that began in the student counterculture movements of the late 1960s and 1970s. Schools at that time ...
About 30,000 people from across Japan packed a baseball stadium in Niigata on Saturday for the annual counting of fan votes for the AKB48 family of all-female idol groups. In the eighth event, widely known as the "AKB48 general election," Rino Sashihara, 23, of Fukuoka-based ...
AKS, the firm that runs the all-female idol group AKB48, announced Thursday it is "reviewing" operations of its Shanghai-based sister unit, SNH48. According to a statement released by the group's website, the operators of SNH48 were found to be in "contractual violations," "necessitating a review ...
The president of a women's university on Monday lashed out at a song written by Yasushi Akimoto, mastermind of the all-girl idol group AKB48, that says it is OK for girls to be "empty-headed" and that being intelligent is "meaningless" if one is "not ...
Two cities in Tottori Prefecture have set up a facility called the Tottori Deai Support Center, which is a kind of matchmaking service for young residents. In December it published a pamphlet to help people looking for mates better understand what the opposite sex ...
Minami Takahashi formally ended her career as a member of the all-girl pop group AKB48 on Friday, after performing in her last live show in Tokyo's Akihabara district. "I am just thankful to you ... I was super happy," the tearful Takahashi said in her ...
